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Katie Fforde has reeled in her first ever number one spot in the Official UK Top 50, as A Summer at Sea (Arrow) swam up the chart in its second week on sale. It sold 15,568 copies for £60,622 to displace Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet (Absolute) in the top spot.
Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard (Faber) hung on to second place for a third week running, as Jenny Colgan’s The Summer Seaside Kitchen (Sphere) also soared, cresting into third place and selling 9,704 copies, for the author’s highest chart ranking.
David Walliams replaced David Walliams at the top of the Children’s chart, as the newly-released paperback of Grandpa’s Great Escape (HarperCollins Children's) beat 2016 Christmas number one The Midnight Gang into second place. Grandpa… hit fifth overall, shifting 9,297 copies. Other half-term hits included Liz Pichon’s Super Good Skills (Almost….) (Scholastic), which slid into 32nd place, and a plethora of "Lego Batman Movie" tie-ins: The Lego Batman Movie Ultimate Sticker Collection (DK Children's) climbed to 28th place, Lego Batman Movie: Chaos in Gotham City (Egmont) hit 40th and Lego Batman Movie: The Junior Novel entered the Pre-School top 20 for the first time.
The only notable exception was Dr Miranda MacQuitty’s Natural History Museum guide Kids Only (NHM), usually a half-term hardy perennial. Despite a 476% jump in volume week on week, it only reached 117th place in the chart last week. With the Natural History Museum’s main Hintze Hall closed for re-development until the summer, have book sales suffered as a result?
It wasn’t just the Lego Batman Movie books that benefitted from the Hollywood treatment: Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (William Collins) entered the Top 50 for the first time, in 27th place, and Nicola Yoon’s Zoella Book Club pick Everything, Everything (Corgi Children's) rebounded into the Children’s and YA Fiction top 20, after the release of its film adaptation trailer, starring Amandla “Hunger Games” Stenberg. And with "Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children" out on DVD, the original novel by Ransom Riggs (Quirk) hit the Small Publishers top spot.
Joe Wicks' Lean in 15 (Bluebird) spent a 60th week in the Top 50, and a 32nd week atop the Paperback Non-Fiction chart. The combined volume of the Instagram peronal trainer's Lean in 15 trifecta has now surpassed two million books sold.
The print market was 1.5% down in value week on week, but was a whopping 4.5% up on the same week in 2016. With a 1.5% jump in volume year on year, this was the first week of 2017 to improve in both volume and value on the year before. Average selling price continued to soar: at £8.21, it was 3% up year on year—the biggest rise since the first week of October 2016.